Hot SXSW Teaser: ‘Starry Eyes’

EXCLUSIVE: Genre pics are a hot commodity on the fest circuit and here’s an exclusive first look at one SXSW Midnighters title to watch this week. Alexandra Essoe stars in Starry Eyes as Sarah, a wannabe starlet in L.A. who lands a lead role in a film only to find herself undergoing a series of terrifying mental and physical transformations. Pic is written and directed by longtime collaborators Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer, whose credits include 2003’s Postcards from the Future: The Chuck Palahniuk Documentary. For Starry Eyes the duo teamed up with Snowfort Pictures producer Travis Stevens (Cheap Thrills, Jodorowsky’s Dune) and turned to Kickstarter to raise funds. Amanda Fuller (Last Man Standing), Fabianne Therese (John Dies At The End), Noah Segan (Looper), Shane Coffey (Pretty Little Liars), and Pat Healy (Cheap Thrills) also star in the psychological body horror pic which will be looking to make an impression on buyers next week in Austin.

“In today’s world, people gauge their own celebrity by the amount of followers they have on Twitter, by how many ‘Likes’ they get on Facebook,” said co-director Widmyer. “We’re living in an age where everyone wants to feel famous. So we wanted to focus on a young woman caught up in that hunger, that is given an opportunity to do something horrible to attain her dreams, and she dives in head first.”Starry Eyes world premieres Saturday at SXSW, which kicks off this Friday, and is produced by Widmyer and Kölsch’s Parallactic Pictures and Stevens for Snowfort Pictures. Malik Ali, Bade Ali, Hamza Ali, Dark Sky Films’ Greg Newman, John Jarzemsky, Paper Street Pictures’ Aaron B. Koontz, Gena Wilbur, and Giles Daoust of Title Media are exec producers. Preferred Content’s Kevin Iwashina is repping domestic sales with MPI’s Nicola Goelzhaeuser handling foreign rights. Check out the exclusive teaser: